Bloodland: A Novel (33 page)

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I think I’ve discovered what happened to Susie, to all of them.’

‘Jimmy, please.’

‘No, listen. I’m not insane. Everything is connected … me stopping the book, taking on the Bolger thing, it’s the same people … I was put under a lot of pressure, and … even that guy last night, who jumped off the building, Dave Conway, have you heard about that?
He
was there, at Drumcoolie Castle, he –’

‘Jesus, Jimmy,
stop
.’

He does.

But not for long. ‘Maria, please, let’s meet. Believe me, you’re going to want to hear what I have to say.’

There is a long silence. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy, but you sound deranged.’

‘Maybe I do. I’ve been up all night. But
listen
to me.’ He starts whispering. ‘The helicopter was sabotaged. The target was the Italian guy, Gianni Bonacci. He worked for the UN. The others were collateral damage.’ He pauses. ‘It’s very complicated, Maria’ – he hadn’t been going to say
this
either, not yet – ‘but you have to understand, it wasn’t Susie’s fault.’

*   *   *

Unpaid leave.

Effective immediately.

If that isn’t code for
fuck you, you crazy motherfucker, hit the road and don’t come back
, then Tom Szymanski doesn’t know what is. That’s the downside of working for a PMC, no job security, no guaranteed
de
ployment – and no back-up services either, no Walter Reed.

No tea, no fucking sympathy.

Just a one-way ticket to JFK and make your own way home after that, thank you very much.

Fuck
you very much.

He rolls over on the bed and faces the wall.

But come on, six months of having the inside of your head pounded in the Congolese jungle and you’re supposed to just ease back into civilian life and switch it
off
?

Szymanski himself, though, never actually had it switched
on
– not over there, that was his thing, his chilled exterior, the quality he was most proud of, like guys who professed to have big dicks or still had hair. But then this bastard Lutz thought he detected … what? Early signs of stress, a disproportionate reaction to what had happened? Didn’t want his unit contaminated with any hint of darkness? With feelings of remorse or grief or guilt? Didn’t want anyone having nightmares?

Good luck with
that
.

Asshole.

The irony, however, is that in the week he’s been back all Szymanski has had has been fucking nightmares.

With the neat accompanying trick of never actually seeming to fall asleep.

Chilled exterior, I don’t fucking
think
so, not anymore.

He hasn’t told anyone he’s back yet, and isn’t going to either, not for the moment. Instead of taking a connecting flight on to Cleveland he got the AirTrain and then a subway into Manhattan and has been holed up in a hotel here ever since, two hundred bucks a night, and all the junk food, tequila and hookers midtown can throw at him.

He doesn’t want to go home. That’s why he signed up with Gideon Global in the first place, after his three tours in Iraq – anything to avoid his folks, his ex-wife, his two kids, the ghost of his former life as a solid citizen of C-town.

So maybe he did react, so what? Watching that poor sap get shot in the head at point blank range was pretty fucking intense.

Ashes.

Ray Kroner.

And then those women and kids
he’d
just smoked.

Fuck
me.

What is it, you see hundreds of incidents, roadside bombings, IEDs going off, firestorms, shootings, all sorts of trauma and injuries – plus some of that other stuff in Congo,
holy
shit – and you ride it out, you even laugh some of it off, as a survival mechanism. But then
one
thing comes along, a particular incident, and it may not even be such a big deal, if you’re looking at it as a scale of one-to-ten sort of thing – intensity-wise, body count-wise – but it
sticks
.

In your brain.

And that’s it, you’ve got it for the rest of your life, like a fucking tattoo, this single image that keeps coming back at you – when you close your eyes, when your mind drifts, when the booze wears off, when your cock goes limp again. It’s like what some couples have – our song, listen honey, they’re playing our song – well this is
your
song, motherfucker, all yours, and don’t you forget it.

In Szymanski’s case – with due respect to those two women and the three little kids – it’s Ray Kroner’s twisted face lying in the mud, twisted because of how the bullet stretched the top of his head off to one side.

He’s never going to get that image out of his mind. He didn’t know Kroner that well, and didn’t even like him, but now he’s stuck with him.

And you know who he blames?

Szymanski rolls over, gets off the bed and goes to the window. Some view. The back of another hotel, a much taller one, stacked rows of windows and AC units as far up as he can see. Down to the left there’s an alley-way with a thin shard of early morning street action just visible at the end of it – cars passing, MTA buses, yellow cabs, regular New York shit.

He saw him on TV a few days after he got back, on one of the Sunday morning talk shows,
Meet the Press
or
Face the Nation
or
Suck my Dick
, one of those, he doesn’t remember, he was flicking around, hungover as shit, waiting for room service, and up he pops on the screen, with a brace on his hand, and they spin this … this fucking
fairy
tale about an early morning accident on the streets of Paris. But he doesn’t want to talk about it, no, of course not, he wants to talk about the
issues
.

That’s who he blames.

The guy on TV.

The guy they were protecting and who Ray Kroner should have blown away when he had the fucking chance.

That’s
who.

Senator John
fucking
Rundle.

*   *   *

Maria Monaghan can’t meet Jimmy until lunchtime.

Which means he has a few hours. He looks at his watch.
Three
hours, give or take.

So maybe he should …

Have some breakfast. Establish a little structure.

He eats a bowl of cereal. After that he takes a shower. He gets dressed. He puts on more coffee. Then it’s down to work. He has to concentrate. His impulse is to give in here, to let it all overwhelm him – exhaustion, revulsion, confusion – but unless he can clarify certain points, and gather some evidence, he will remain the deranged person he was on the phone a short while ago to Maria.

So.

First. A body found in the Wicklow hills. He locates the story from a few weeks ago. There are reports in four different newspapers on the same day.

Couple out walking their dog.

Remains of a body found in a ditch.

There was some speculation, apparently, about who it might be, but no names were mentioned and no official identification was made. He keeps searching.

These are the only references to the story that he comes across.

He does another search, with a specific date range, and finds the missing person story from three years ago. Thirty-one-year-old Joe Macken, a security guard. He went missing. That’s it. No detail about where he worked. No known criminal associations. He had a wife and baby. A further search using his name turns up very little, just two or three other references in more general stories about people who have disappeared.

Is it him? Have they identified him yet? Presumably when they find a body they cross reference it with their database of missing persons.

DNA, dental records, finger prints, stuff like that.

And what if it is him?

Conway said this guy had seen something or had felt that something wasn’t right at the place where he worked, the Leinster Helicopters maintenance hangar in Kildare. But
what
specifically? And now that he’s dead – which is presumably
why
– how is anyone ever going to find out?

On to phase two.

Jimmy picks up his phone again.

He calls the Missing Persons Bureau. He calls Leinster Helicopters. He calls a guy he used to work with who is now a crime correspondent for a local radio station. He calls a few other people. He leaves messages. He even gets a couple of callbacks.

But what comes from all of this is … nothing.

The crime correspondent tells Jimmy in the strictest confidence that although it hasn’t officially been confirmed yet the body that was found in the Wicklow hills a few weeks back is probably that of missing Dolanstown drugs kingpin Derek Flood. The woman he talks to at Leinster Helicopters barely remembers Joe Macken and when she checks with a colleague it turns out that Macken worked for an agency in any case. A further inquiry reveals that about a year after he disappeared Macken’s wife remarried and emigrated to Australia.

It’s as if everything has evaporated.

As for the CCTV footage in the London hotel where Bolger died, what is
that
, conceivably, going to reveal? And how is Jimmy Gilroy, unemployed journalist, supposed to get his hands on it in the first place?

He looks up from his desk and out across the room.

Let’s hear it everybody for the deranged person.

*   *   *

‘Housekeeping.’

Tom Szymanski turns to face the door, groans.

‘Yeah,’ he says, half shouting it, ‘five minutes.’

He stands up from the bed, flicks the TV off and throws the remote onto the pillow.

There’s less work these last few mornings for housekeeping to do. What is it? He looks around the room. He doesn’t know. This is Friday. The last time he had a hooker up here was Sunday or Monday. The last time he got properly shitfaced, with all the concomitant fallout, beer bottles, ashtrays, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, was … night before last? Or night before that again?

He’s not sure.

Last night he did nothing.

Watched TV, smoked a little weed, looked out the window.

It’s not that he’s getting bored or anything, because if you’re a vet, an experienced one, you don’t really
get
bored. You don’t have the luxury. There’s no longer any unoccupied territory in your brain where that can happen.

But you have to keep busy all the same – either working, or overloading your senses – because you
are
fighting something, and if it isn’t boredom, maybe it’s antiboredom. Like antimatter.

Or whatever that shit is.

Dark
matter.

Dark boredom.

Fuck
.

Can he stop this, please?

Outside, Szymanski walks around for a while – up and down Fifth Ave, between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second. It’s a nice day and there’s something easy about New York. It’s frenetic and ceaseless, but if you don’t bother the place, it won’t bother you.

He stops in at a diner for some breakfast.

He takes a booth by the window and sits down. Beside him, there’s a newspaper. He picks it up. It’s a
New York Post
. Today’s. Someone must have left it behind.

He lays it out on the table in front of him.

Waitress comes. He orders coffee and –

It’s really all about the coffee.

Coffee and pancakes.

‘You want some OJ with that today?’

No, I want it
tomorrow
, you stu—

Easy.

He nods. Goes back to the
Post
. He doesn’t buy newspapers. Doesn’t believe in them. All the shit you’re expected to eat.

Sports coverage maybe, but even that.

He reads a thing about City Councilman Tony Rapello (D-Bronx), who wants to introduce legislation forcing bar and nightclub owners to install a minimum number of security cameras. He reads about a newborn baby that was found abandoned at a subway station in Queens, left in a bag next to a fucking MetroCard machine.

Jesus
.

Then, as his pancakes are arriving, he sees it.

Run, Johnny, run.

That
mother
fucker.

John Rundle is rumoured to be setting up an exploratory committee for a possible presidential run next year …

Szymanski nearly chokes on his coffee.

Accompanying the article there’s a photo of Senator ‘Johnny’ Rundle, complete with prominent hand brace, standing next to some bearded guy outside an unidentified office building. Although Rundle isn’t quoted directly in the article, an aide says that the senator will be attending a reception in the city on Wednesday, at the Blackwood Hotel, and that an announcement may be made then.

The article goes on to explain that the senator sustained a serious injury while on a recent trade delegation to Paris. He was coming to the aid of a motorcyclist, who had collided with a barricade, when his hand was crushed underneath the hapless Parisian’s chopper.

Szymanski laughs at this.

Again.

And this time out loud.

Which gets some looks.

He starts his pancakes, and re-reads the article.

What was it Lutz said the day of the incident? That the senator’s brother owned the mine at Buenke? That they were a ‘big’ family? And that consequently Ashes had picked the wrong day to go crazy?

Szymanski leans forward and studies the photo again.

It’s well known that politicians lie all the time, but it’s not every day you get to catch one out in as blatant and incontrovertible a lie as this.

He pushes his plate aside and drains his coffee.

What day is this? Friday?

He air-signs check to the waitress.

Maybe he’ll hang around the city until Wednesday, see what happens.

See what kind of a day
that
is.

*   *   *

Walking along Wicklow Street on his way to meet Maria Monaghan, Jimmy’s phone rings.

He pulls it out and checks the incoming number.

‘Phil?’

‘Jimmy.’ Phil Sweeney’s voice is quiet, muted. ‘How are you?’